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O artigo explora a possibilidade de desenvolver uma metodologia para estudar o surgimento da ação agentiva experimentalmente. Ele discute as limitações da pesquisa experimental clássica e busca uma perspectiva diferente sobre a questão do controle. O argumento começa por analisar como o conceito de uma experiência tem se expandido ao longo dos anos na pesquisa científica social. Em seguida, novas aberturas são consideradas para experiências além do paradigma de controle e uma metodologia de intervenções formativas, particularmente adequadas ao estudo do surgimento de ações agentivas. São sugeridas três qualidades centrais de experimentos além do paradigma de controle dentro da abordagem histórico-cultural, a saber: (1) construir sobre os conflitos de motivação dos participantes; (2) focalizar a formação de ações agentivas dos participantes de dar sentido e transformar a situação experimental (3) seguindo com expansões temporais e espaciais para além do quadro inicial da experiência. O artigo conclui com uma discussão das implicações metodológicas mais amplas dessas novas aberturas

In the U.S. school systems, Native American students receive harsher and more frequent school discipline than White counterparts. Exclusionary discipline may result in adverse academic, social, and life outcomes. There is an urgent need for creating an inclusive, equity-oriented learning environment where Native American students' identities, well-being, and dignity are promoted and nurtured. To develop a culturally responsive behavioral support system aimed to address racial disparity in school discipline, the Indigenous Learning Lab was implemented at a rural high school in Wisconsin. Indigenous Learning Lab is an inclusive problem-solving process through which Native American students, parents, and community members and non-native school staff collectively examine disproportionality in school discipline and design a new school-wide system. The purpose of this study is to examine how participation in Indigenous Learning Lab expanded local stakeholders' individual agency to collective, transformative agency in designing a culturally responsive behavioral support system.

Theories of agency are often borrowed from psychology and sociology; truly educational theories of agency are rare -- theories that not only classify and measure dimensions of agency but enable us to understand how its formation can be pedagogically facilitated. Based on Sannino's recent work on transformative agency by double stimulation (TADS), a truly educational approach to agency is gaining traction. In double stimulation, a person or group faces a paralysing conflict of motives (first stimulus) which is resolved by identifying a meaningful artefact that is turned into a sign (second stimulus). Today's critical learning challenges typically do not have obvious or 'correct' solutions. They require a pedagogy that allows learners to face conflicts and construct artefacts to help break out of their paralysis. The paradigm of double stimulation, as explored in the articles in this issue, offers as tarting point for a pedagogy of agentive actions and expanding possibilities.

The paper analyzes a collaborative learning process among Finnish pre-service teachers planning their own learning in a self-regulated way. The study builds on cultural-historical activity theory and the theory of expansive learning, integrating for the first time an analysis of learning actions and an analysis of types of interaction. We examine the theory of expansive learning as a possible conceptual and methodological framework for understanding this type of collaborative learning. The task of the paper is primarily methodological. We believe that cultural-historical activity theory needs to be turned into methods and procedures of systematic empirical analysis, and this article examines one such methodological solution. At the same time, we aim to uncover some substantive dynamics of expansive learning in collaborative teacher education oriented at open-ended problems and tasks. An almost complete expansive mini-cycle of learning actions appeared in the pre-service teachers' meeting. However, an analysis of the steps of formation of the shared object revealed a more complex iterative process. As the expansive learning process moved epistemically from questioning to analysis, modeling and implementation, it also moved interactionally from coordination to cooperation and communication. Yet there was no mechanical correspondence between specific learning actions and specific types of interaction. Transitions and disturbances were crucial for the dynamics of expansive learning. A full assessment of a potentially expansive mini-cycle of learning calls for extending the time scale of the analysis.

This study examines learning in home care visits aimed at systematic facilitation of clients' physical mobility. Building on the theory of expansive learning, we ask what kinds of learning cycles may be identified in home care encounters charged with implementing the new Mobility Agreement practice, what kinds of interplay may be detected between the parallel learning cycles of the home care client and the home care worker, and what the characteristics of defensive learning are. The data consist of 30 videotaped home care visits. The learning cycles of the encounters were found to be either predominantly defensive or expansive, which led to the identification of 4 basic types of combined learning cycles. Encounters in which the client's and the worker's cycles were aligned tended to contain fewer learning actions than encounters in which the cycles moved to opposite directions. The latter types of encounters were characterized by subtle orientational mismatches that left matters open and invoked further elaboration by the client and the worker. Defensive cycles were more reflective than expected and seemed to involve aspects of agency that are not commonly acknowledged.

The article explores developmental tensions in Finnish adolescents' accounts of their different worlds. By understanding tensions experienced by students, educators can develop their pedagogical practices to address those tensions. Building on cultural-historical activity theory, we analysed 12 interviews of 8th graders, focusing on their experiences in six worlds: family, school, peers, digital, civic, and future activity. The adolescents experienced their worlds as mutually penetrating hybridised configurations. Hybridisation is a source of tensions. Using the method of analysing discursive manifestations of contradictions, we identified tensions ranging from dilemmas to conflicts, critical conflicts and double binds. These represented all the six worlds, with school being the host of the largest number of tensions. The school emerged as a site of conflicts, civic involvement as a source of hesitation and doubt, and future as a source of some degree of desperation. About half of the manifestations were hybrid, involving more than one world. The world of school was most highly hybridised, and the most hybridised was the relationship between school and peer activity. For these adolescents, the challenge is not just moving from one world to another; dwelling in one single setting such as the school means facing tensions generated by hybridisation. Tensions stemming from the intrusion into the school of other worlds cannot be suppressed but should be turned into drivers of expansive learning and development. Our findings are an invitation for the school to become involved in collaborative efforts to address the sources of tensions and transform the practices of schooling accordingly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changes and transformations in organisations are traditionally initiated by the management. This approach does not, however, encourage the agency of all the members in an organisation to engage in cooperative development of the activity. This paper presents an analysis of the development of participants' transformative agency in a Change Laboratory (CL) intervention. In a CL, the participants analyse conflicts and disturbances in their local activity and search for ways to transform current work practices. In the analysis, we identified six types of expressions of transformative agency which evolved over the course of the laboratory sessions and across the topical contents of those sessions. Furthermore, we examined to what extent the expressions of agency produced by the participants reflected individual and collective agency. Our key argument based on the research findings is that transformative agency goes beyond the individual and the situational here-and-now actions. It is produced and maintained in collective change efforts and evolves over time.

Purpose: The paper aims to examine organizational authoring understood as a longitudinal, material and dialectical process of transformation efforts. The following questions are asked: To which extent can a Change Laboratory intervention help practitioners author their own learning? Are the authored outcomes of a Change Laboratory intervention futile if a workplace subsequently undergoes large-scale organizational transformations? Does the expansive learning authored in a Change Laboratory intervention survive large-scale organizational transformations, and if so, why does it survive and how? Design/methodology/approach: The paper develops a conceptual argument based on cultural-historical activity theory. The conceptual argument is grounded in the examination of a case of eight years of change efforts in a university library, including a Change Laboratory (CL) intervention. Follow-up interview data are used to discuss and illuminate our argument in relation to the three research questions. Findings: The idea of knotworking constructed in the CL process became a "germ cell" that generates novel solutions in the library activity. A large-scale transformation from the local organization model developed in the CL process to the organization model of the entire university library was not experienced as a loss. The dialectical tension between the local and global models became a source of movement driven by the emerging expansive object. Practitioners are modeling their own collective future competences, expanding them both in socio-spatial scope and interactive depth. Originality/value: The article offers an expanded view of authorship, calling attention to material changes and practical change actions. The dialectical tensions identified serve as heuristic guidelines for future studies and interventions.

This article examines formative interventions as we understand them in cultural-historical activity theory and reflects on key differences between this intervention research tradition and design-based research as it is conceived in the learning sciences tradition. Three projects, including 2 Change Laboratories, are analyzed with the help of conceptual lenses derived from basic epistemological principles for intervention research in activity theory. In all 3 interventions, learners expansively transformed the object of their activity. The Change Laboratory cases, however, show that this learning process included productive deviations from the researchers' instructional intentions, leading to significant outcomes, both practical and theoretical, that were not anticipated by the interventionists. Together these cases illustrate that an activity-theoretical formative intervention approach differs from design-based research in the following ways: (a) formative interventions are based on design done by the learners; (b) the collective design effort is seen as part of an expansive learning process including participatory analyses and implementation phases; (c) rather than aiming at transferable and scalable solutions, formative interventions aim at generative solutions developing over lengthy periods of time both in the researched activities and in the research community.

This commentary focuses on the ways the set of articles in this issue, taken together, engage an important and much needed conversation in design-based approaches to inquiry: that is, what does it mean to do work in and with nondominant communities? Drawing on cultural historical activity theory, decolonizing methodologies, and indigenous perspectives, these articles seek to advance participatory design research as a means to foreground the development of socially just systems with equitable forms of teaching and learning. Specifically, the "social change making" projects exemplified reflect a generational and hybrid shift in design approaches, incorporating political and innovative dimensions of other methods with shared aims. A notable focus of participatory design research is that design and interventions are understood and addressed as part of everyday activity. In this way, change making projects are conceptualized from within the practices and commitments, and histories of communities. These new sensibilities about working with nondominant communities necessarily involve rethinking and explicitly redesigning the research and participants. subject positions across all aspects of the intervention. Finally, these emergent participatory design research projects argue that issues of race, equity, and inequality are neither sufficiently theorized or addressed by other theoretical approaches, including cultural activity theoretical approaches.